H@RD TRUTHS BY GHK LALL – Pander bears

Jan 24, 2024 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

---

Kaieteur News – I mean exactly that: PANDER Bears.  There are pander bears and then there are panda bears.  Where the national patrimony is concerned, Guyana’s political leaders have now dedicated their efforts to being pander bears.  Their hope is that in so doing, they will be embraced as panda bears by those who help themselves to Guyanese riches.

To pander is to cater to the needs of some specific interest, person, or entity.  It is to appreciate what that other party or entity desires, and then to bend one’s knees, to bend oneself double, to bend oneself in any and every way imaginable to satisfy the priorities, visions, and lusts of that person or entity.  When pandering gets very highly pitched, there can be significant difficulty separating it from actual prostitution.  Those are my definitions of pandering, now try this, fellow Guyanese.  When used in a political context (which I am doing), pandering is working without interruption to ensure that views expressed, positions taken, and issues treated curiously, or left alone, fit smoothly and unerringly into those of the people (or entity) being pleased.

With this extended background painfully presented, I have a simple question for fellow citizens: PPP citizens, PNC citizens, AFC citizens, and all other citizens of Guyana.  What is it that we have here for leaders where this enormous oil patrimony is concerned?  Have we not had pandering of the most naked and ugly, if not obscene, sort?  Pandering by Guyanese leaders-elected and selected and self-appointed-to Exxon and the likes of Alistair Routledge, he with his billboards, and cricket bats, and mouthfuls of sweet Texas molasses. With his silky speeches about unprecedented revenue stream, and future revenue maximization?  These foreign sophisticates think that all Guyanese are still up in treetops and as dumb as shovels.  But this is what our guys, my brothers, pander to, kowtow before, as though Guyana is now the ancient Orient, where prostration was the ritual of the begging class.

I encourage citizens to listen to their own.  Listen to the tortured circumlocutions of the Chief Oil Strategist, the Champion Oil Warrior, and whose interests come first, those of this country, or those of the people from the Texas badlands.  When there has been enough of the circumlocutions (pandering), then try the truths that are invisibly slender and qualify for the borderline only, because they are so riddled with patented deceptions.  No Guyanese should be so dense that they require a name, or a title.  On each occasion that this fine chap struggles with some simple oil question, I shudder, want to scream, and then run for the washroom.  It is time to upchuck.  I mean is this what the wealth of the Guyanese people has come to, this sorry state?

Of course, pandering houses lash and backlash. Those are consequences of struggles like these.  The venomous, vile, and vicious reign.  See skipper, the unruly, the noisy, and the unfriendly are checked.  By any means necessary.  By any dirty trick that has to be employed.  Dirty tricks is the middle name of some leaders.  It is for the craven satisfaction of the men calling the shots in today’s Oil Guyana.  I give a helping hand: he is not Guyanese.  These are not noble Americans.  Just goddamned pillagers of the hopes of poor, hungry, hurting Guyanese.

Then, there is the other fellow, a one-time mean machine, who is now a machine from which three of the four wheels have fallen off.  In this country, leaders pretend to be Dirty Harry, where this oil is concerned, only to end up being the worst of comedies.  Whereas one is about laughable circumlocutions, this leader is about evasions that are so transparent that the blind could discern what is going on through a volcanic shower. The first banna is about holding on to power at all costs, and whatever pandering must be, will be. Guaranteed. This leader is all about how to get a grip (hold) on power, and if it means that words have to be spliced together to get closer and closer to Objective State House, then then is what will have to be.  It has been so, just consult with the record.  I trash this nonsense about ballot box power.

While all of this is going on, there is that other leader sailing along.  When he should be furious, he is dubious.  When he must be serious, he is frivolous. One not only curious, but spurious.  But there is rhyme and reason to all this pandering by Dicky, Tricky, and Mickey to the powers of oil.  There is that other vision held dear: to be seen as panda bears.  Imagine this our political brothers saddled with the sacred duties of brave leaders have one ambition: to be held as panda bears by the men from Texas (and Washington).  Quick digression, it would be heartening to hear from those Guyanese who once railed against imperialism. Panda bears, I remind everyone, are cuddly, lovable, and, oh, so adorable creatures.  They pose and smile languidly; impotent, immobile creatures.  In sum, this is how our leaders wish to be viewed by the Americans: nonthreatening, nonaggressive, and none-too-pressing on the patrimony of the Guyanese people.  When Guyanese masses need pit bulls, they get panda bears and pander bears.  Good luck, Guyana.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

---

• GHK Lall, H@rd Truths, National, Pander bears, party

---